Panopticon (SIGNED, edt of 130)

Riccardo Dogana
Panopticon (SIGNED, edt of 130)

Photographs: Riccardo Dogana

Text: Riccardo Dogana and Tommaso Di Dio

Publisher: Origini Edizioni

82 pages

Pictures: 49

Year: 2020

Price: 70 €

Comments: In a plastic silver bag, folding soft cover, sewn binding, 26,7 x 24,5 cm, b&w photographs. Text in English and Italian. Limited to 130 copies. The plastic bag is torn, and the second half of the book is marked on some pages (as seen in picture 12). Signed by Riccardo Dogana. Design: Valentino Barachini

Riccardo Dogana gathered these dazzling flashes on the mechanical cornea of his own photographic device, without any cold attitude, letting himself down the screens our world is made of.

What he sees happen makes us feel lost, it bothers us, it fascinates us. It feels like we cannot believe in what we see; or better: we doubt its consistency. They look like hallucinations, phosphenes, fractals of a mind we are lost into. And yet, the images in this book belong to us, and are fraternal to us: we cannot but feel our full participation to it. We even think we already saw them: as if shadows stolen from our screens, déjà-vu. […]

Panopticon is a reasonable way to this violation: the diary of a man who travelled through the screens. In these images you can find one possible circumnavigation around the images the world produced and stored in the web, in the last ten years. Months long meticulous daily collection: one immersion into the monitor, deep into the vast dark abyss of the database. Entering this stream of images, feels like falling into the heart of this time of our, sensing its own murk: a darkness that somewhere, starts to move, a body that captures all the world’s light just to let some bright, quick, sticky, painful smudge shine out of it.